Thursday, September 13, 2007

Tit-For-Tat Proxy Wars

By Cernig

While the Bush administration are mounting a full court press to paint Iran as the instigator of all that is going wrong in Iraq, let us not forget that accusations and evidence for proxy wars flow both ways.

Today, Newsweek has an exclusive report on just one part of the alleged U.S. proxy war on Iran - backing for the PJAK Kurdish separatist terror group. Iran has been shelling suspected PJAK strongholds in Kurdish Iraq recently, a possible flash-point for war with the U.S.

The conflict has traditionally been “totally local, with little chance of spreading,” Hiltermann says, before adding one caveat: “unless the U.S. starts to support PJAK, and you get a proxy war inside Iran.” In that case, he insists, “Iran will retaliate. [And] not necessarily in the Qandil Mountains.”

With tensions rising between the U.S. and Iran, could this battle in Kurdistan’s hills set off a larger conflagration? Iran insists that the PJAK militants are armed and supported by the U.S. and Israel, an accusation that both countries deny. Yet at least some recent reports have suggested that the U.S. and Israel might be doing just that in an effort to weaken the regime in Tehran as it pursues its goal of becoming a nuclear power. A report in The New Yorker late last year by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted a consultant with ties to the Pentagon as saying that Israel was providing PJAK guerillas with “equipment and training,” and that the Kurdish militants had been given a list of Iranian targets of interest to the U.S.

Newsweek reports that the PJAK deny being armed by the U.S. and Israel, although they wouldn't be averse to such a thing and have had contact “at a high level” with the Bush administration. However, the PJAK are closely connected to another Kurdish terror group, the PKK, which is mostly active in Turkey. The PKK's attacks in Turkey have raised the very real probability of a Turkish cross-border military operation into Iraq, which would be disastrous for the U.S. military presence there. Turkey, like Iran, has also reportedly shelled suspected terrorist positions inside Iraq but to date the Bush administration have done little about Kurdish support for the terror group.

But the PKK and PJAK aren't the only terror groups the U.S. is alleged to be helping. There have been persistent and credible reports that the cossetted MeK terror group - formerly Saddam's bully-boys but now kept under minimal supervision by Coalition forces - have also been used as proxies by the U.S. for attacks in Iran.

The media outwith Iran gives little coverage to attacks and deaths inside that nation by groups using terrorist tactics - but casualties probably equal or surpass those from alleged Iranian activities in Iraq. American use of proxies to fight their undeclared enemy also seems to predate reports of violence in Iraq attributed to Iranian action.

While I've no doubt that the superior message machine of the administration will continue to build a narrative which says Iran is the only evil aggressor in the Iraq story, there's much more to the tale than meets the eye. There really is no moral high ground to claim, only political spin of intelligence in support of a pre-determined agenda.